Not everyone hates the government. The executives of big companies are actually so fond of them that they even take their government chums out to expensive restaurants and parties on their private yachts.

It's just the poor people who hate the government, because they're all nasty and poor and horrible.

And the middle classes, whose tax money is going on unpopular schemes like wars and helping poor people.

Oh, and the professionals/entrepreneurs, because after years of hard work, sacrifice and risk-taking that will stop many in their tracks, those who do succeed are then considered "rich" and taxed sharply, while the people who are actually rich have enough mobility to avoid those same high taxes, which is why the very high tax rates don't actually raise much money for the government anyway.

Oh, and the professionals/entrepreneurs, because after years of hard work, sacrifice and risk-taking that will stop many in their tracks, those who do succeed are then considered "rich" and taxed sharply,...

I really don't put Mark Zuckerberg and all the other "professionals/entrepreneurs" in that category.

And everyone works hard, takes risks and sacrifices. Everyone. It's just a question of what to sacrifice.

I have a relative - one of those "professionals/entrepreneurs" - as he puts it, "I worked 30 years and had a few lucky breaks to achieve my 'fame' (that's the way he put it)"

He's also on his third wife and a few screwed up kids.

Unfortunately, for every "success" story, the people don't realize that there are thousands of others who did exactly the same thing but failed; sometimes to ruinous consequences. And yet folks point to the few successes and say "look! anyone can do it if you just had the gumption!' Like everyone who's failed wasn't worthy; and everyone who's succeeded did so because they were worthy of said success.

Are you going to tell me that someone who just happened to be at the right place at the right time is a success because of his hard work?

That's an insult to those out there who are truly working their asses off and taking risks.

And the "professionals" you mention. You mean doctors? They take no risks. If you are lucky enough to have been born with the talents to do well (No matter how hard I worked, I couldn't pass Organic Chem.) in that field, you are pretty much guaranteed a nice lifestyle. It's no coincidence that MDs are always on top of the lists of highest paid professions. It has nothing to do with brains because if that were the case, then Physicists would be on the top.

There are some professions that are very well-paid, if and when you make it to the higher levels. You mentioned doctors, so let's consider that. Those hospital consultants and GPs who are earning a tidy living at 40 were probably junior doctors at 25. Maybe it's different in the US, but in the UK that means working around twice as many hours as most of us do, severely limiting social life and relationships and several years, and getting paid a fairly feeble wage, certainly far less than anyone with the drive and aptitude to become a senior doctor later could be earning in another field. Even when they become senior doctors, these are people who may be charged with making decisions that are literally life and death, and a lot of them are still working pretty long hours with all the admin that comes with those jobs on top of their clinical work. I don't think paying those people a high wage is at all unreasonable in return for all they did earlier in their lives to get there and in recognition of the skill and experience that they possess as a result. If you want an insult, bundle people like that in the "rich" pile with movie stars, celebrity sportspeople, and old money inheritors who might never have put in an honest day's work in their lives.

As for the entrepreneurs, you're quite right that it's a big risk and many people lose even if they do nothing wrong, but I think it's laughable to pretend that "everyone" works as hard and takes the same level of risk and makes the same level of sacrifice in life. Anyone who is bootstrapping a new business is probably giving up a lot that they could have had and done in order to get that business going, and even if the business is successful it will be paying tax itself and probably contributing to the economy by employing further people before it pays out any big profits. Again, it seems crazy to me that we might look at someone who has maybe risked all their savings, delayed having a family, learned a multitude of useful skills, basically given up a few years of their lives to get a business going, and then if their business is successful still begrudge them earning even 2-3x what they could easily have made in a regular day job. And yet, that is where the top tax rate in the UK kicks in at the moment.

It would be nice to see these entities seized by the IRS and large parts sold off to their competitors. That would certainly stop such huge grants and subsidies in favor of smaller ones spread out. Then your horrible poor and middles could fill the new positions and enjoy the revenues spread amongst their communities.With the previously owned bits spread out, then we will see some innovation flourish because the new humbled titans will have to do something for US today to stay in the race. Your rich profess

It would be nice to see the IRS threatened mafia-style for gouging the rich just "because they can afford it." I'm sure the poorest of the poor would consider the middle class as being able to afford a near-40% marginal tax rate on their earnings, because relative to them, the middle class is "rich." But the middle class would beg to differ, and would argue that millionaires should pay huge tax bills. They fail to recognize the hypocrisy in taking that position.

Here is the trick no one earning over a million dollars annually is actually paying the 35% tax rate. The ones who get screwed are the ones earning more than $250,000 annually but less than a Million.

Ideally the thing to do is to tax investments that last less than an hour at 50%. Right now if you look at wall street the country is experiencing double digit growth. As wall street is supposed to be based on the fundamentals of the companies. it becomes surprising that the companies in question are experiencing at best moderate growth of 1-3%. The rest is the HFT and day trading that bankers love. It does add some liquidity to the market but HFT

Lastly the rich The top 10% of the country controls 75% of the wealth that means they should be paying for 75% of the tax bills but in reality are only paying 50%.

Wow, I'd like a 35% tax rate; ours in NL starts at around that percentage, and goes up to 52%... with that upper bracket kicking in real fast at around €55.000 taxable income. Then there's 21% VAT, municipal taxes (increasing faster than our significant yearly inflation), road tax and the tax on petrol (2/3rds of the price at the pump is tax), the list goes on... Kind of sucks though that here the same thing applies to businesses as well: the large ones can negotiate a low rate, the small ones get stiffed. My business gets taxed at 20%, and on what I take out I pay an additional 25% dividend tax. The big guys? They pay little, it's for good reason that so many international corporations set up their Euro HQ in the Netherlands. And guys like Bono (U2) are doing the same thing.

I suppose it is the same all over: poor people or businesses have little money to tax, and the rich/large ones make sure their interests are mobile: tax them too much and they'll up and leave. It's the ones in the middle who get screwed.

Wow, I'd like a 35% tax rate; ours in NL starts at around that percentage, and goes up to 52%... with that upper bracket kicking in real fast at around â55.000 taxable income.

"Taxable income" is the important term. Talking about the tax rate is pointless when you don't add what "taxable income" is. In one country, the cost of driving to work is deducted from your income to calculate "taxable income". In another country, they are seriously thinking about adding the benefit of having a free parking space where you work to your income to calculate "taxable income". In one country, mortgage payments are deducted from your income, in another country they aren't.

"Tax rate" on its own is meaningless. What you need to know is how much tax people in comparable situations actually pay.

I have an idea: Anyone "earning" more than $1 million per year pays no Federal taxes. At all.

Instead, they just have to spend at least half of their "earnings" on goods and services. Every year. I don't care what they spend it on: Could be yachts, could be Oreos. Could be Chinese-made trinkets or American-made binoculars or Italian sports cars.

Don't care: They must spend it on goods and services. Not domestic investments. Not off-shore resources. And then prove that they've done so, every year, an

Simple really: things look as different from the bottom as they do from the middle and the top. Your poor hate being poor, your middle class are typically striving to make it up another rung, and your rich don't want to fall from their perch. Your poor work with the idea of 'making it,' so that they can be free of the mentality of being poor, as well as the belief that with moving up the ladder means less problems; it does not, it just means different problems. When you're poor, you think as soon as you get another $10K, you'll pay back all your friends, be extra nice, relax, etc.: the reality is, when that $10K comes, your friends will find you, and any voluntary remembrance for their aid becomes an involuntary shakedown, during which the worst of humanity is shown to you. The middle class want to move up, going from middle middle class to upper middle class, or whatever; they try to curry favor on both sides: they want rich friends, the right connections, etc., but they also want to 'remember where they came from' with the poor, as some sort of pride of having worked their way up. The rich want to avoid becoming poor or middle class; it's one thing to be down several million from the fortune you inherited, it's another to not be able to afford to visit Europe whenever the whim strikes you.

Each class has certain 'requirements' as far as being a part of it. This is why someone who acquires a fortune through a lottery is not suddenly thought of as being a part of the upper class; chances are, that money will be gone in a few year's time, and no attempt at understanding the change in class occurs.

As for why everyone hates the government, why, that's simple: your host government is typically the one wielding the most amount of power over your life (save yourself, or your deity), and as such, is the scapegoat for everything that does wrong in your life during your day, from the stubbed toe you got rolling out of bed, to the parking ticket you received. He who has the power, gets the blame! It sucks, but it seems to hold true. Heck, the upper class has worked for ages on how to displace power from blame...that's why you have 'management' running companies, instead of the owners themselves. And their successes have been...somewhat lackluster, to be honest. Lately they've been getting nailed for it...see how many companies have gone tits up, and how the political class is basically losing any semblance of currency with the populace.

Ah, the logical disfunctionality of the anarcho-capitalist. Multi-national corporations play off different countries governments against each other so they end up paying little tax. And somehow that's the government's doing wrong, rather than the the multi-national corporations.

You really dont understand that the IRS is complicit in the shit that you are complaining about, do you?

The IRS might be your tax collection agency, it's not mine. This is a worldwide problem, which is one of the things that indicates that you are the one who doesn't understand this. It's not the problem of your local tax collection agency, it's a fundamental difficulty of there being multiple governments, all with their own tax collection rules and regimes. It's the cracks between that the multi-nationals exploit.

It's difficult to fix because there is no world organisation or government that can stitch the m

New Labour is, thankfully, almost dead. If Miliband manages to win the next election, it will probably be buried. Why do you think grandees like Blair and Mandelson are so quick to put the boot in to him? They're terrified he might win by pursuing a platform other than New Labour. If Miliband loses, it'll throw Labour right back into the throes of New Labour again, in the belief that it's the "only way to win".

Of course they said the same about Cameron and the Tory "Nasty Party", and that didn't exactly tur

Thanks for the update on UK politics. As an American I admit I don't follow it closely enough to engage in real debate. The Blair thing stuck in my craw because it's analogous to the "Third Way" Democrats in the US. Sounds like there's some hope over there. With Obama and his likely successors in the US, not so much.

P.S. Just out of curiosity, under what circumstances would you be willing to call the American War of Independence an unfortunate misunderstanding and take us back?

New Labour has been out of power for 3 years. Is anything getting better? No, it's getting worse. Which is no surprise for anyone that remembers the previous Tory government. Though it has been a bit of a surprise for a lot of people who used to support Lib Dems.

Lets face it, not even the swivel-eyed loons from the shire Tory associations are happy with the current shambles.

To be fair, the incoming government this time was going to inherit a poisoned chalice in so many ways that whoever won they would never have a fighting chance. The only strategic difference was that Labour basically knew they had no chance of winning outright before the election campaign even started, so they could safely poison the well knowing that even in their worst plausible outcome they would have someone to share the blame with in a coalition.

We're drifting a bit off-topic here, but I just wanted to say that I think education actually was one of the other areas where any incoming government was going to be doomed before they even took office.

For years, our education system at secondary and tertiary levels has been based on fantasy. Standards haven't really risen dramatically for decades for secondary school leavers, but it's easier to appease parents and teachers by pretending they have than to pick the fight. You can't really put 50% of each generation through university and expect that the degrees they come out with will get all of them the kinds of graduate jobs that used to be available when only 5-10% of each generation continued on to university. You certainly can't do that, and then not only remove financial support but actively charge a small fortune for the privilege, leaving entire generations saddled with debts before they even start their first real job, and then expect that there will be no negative consequences.

Unfortunately, anything that would fix these problems requires acknowledging that the teaching profession has been covering its collective backside for years rather than confronting the small but significant fraction of professional teachers who simply aren't up to the job. It requires admitting (or at least understanding) that the quality of teaching at universities is often pathetic, and that being an illustrious institution with an international reputation to protect does not change this. It requires honestly confronting falling standards and recognising that the entire basis of our higher education system is unsustainable and economically crippling a generation. It will take big changes to fix these things one way or another, but it was a constant pressure for change and improvement that created many of the underlying problems in the first place, so what to do?

Gove himself is a slightly odd character to me, because half of the time I feel like he's the first Education Secretary we've had in years who actually has the guts to stand up and tell it as it is, but the other half of the time I wonder where he dreamt up this or that crazy idea and what he was smoking when he thought alienating this or that major part of the education profession would help.

There were more than 2 choices. The Republicans and Democrats have everyone convinced that if you vote for a 3rd party, you're throwing your vote away. They rally people around hot-button issues to distract everyone from the fact that they are 90% the same. If people want change they need to stop voting for Republicans and Democrats, especially at the national level. Even if you don't care, go out and vote for a 3rd party candidate. Barring a miracle, they're not going to win any major elections right away.

The 'funny' comes in when you remember that this is only half the joke. The original sketches then told of how things worked in America, where it was the other way around.

For instance: In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, the Party can always find you.

So, to completely ruin the joke by over-explaining it, if the government controls the corporations in Soviet Russia, it must be the other way around in America. Ergo, that the corporations control the government.

Congress sets tax policy, and representatives are all over the map politically. You can make a difference, once representative at a time. And you have to get started during the primaries, not once it comes down to a binary choice.

We need millions of taxpayers, especially small businesses to not only refuse to pay their taxes but dare the government to arrest them for tax evasion until we have a fair and easy to enforce tax code. When I say dare, I mean in the sense of forcing the government to literally go to war or back down and fix the system.

Your taxes go to pay for things we ALL need. Like roads, and firemen and teachers.

Roads are paid for (mostly) by fuel taxes. Fireman and teachers are paid out of local property taxes. Those taxes are fair, reasonable, and almost impossible to avoid. Income taxes, on the other hand, are easy to avoid by anyone who puts some effort into it. I am self employed, have a six figure income and, through completely legal means, I pay no income tax. The problem is not that the system needs some tweaks to close "loopholes", but that trying to tax net productive activity (rather than consumption or ownership) has perverse side effects and is fundamentally unfair. No country has ever made income tax work well.

We need millions of taxpayers, especially small businesses to not only refuse to pay their taxes

Not necessary. The system has already been rigged by propagators of the Laffer curve myth so that the government collects only a small fraction of the taxes necessary to pay for its operation. So you're already not paying most of your taxes.

That's the attitude that I'm talking about, and it's bankrupting this country.

Except in times of large-scale war or financial panic, the government needs to collect taxes to cover its expenditures. If balancing the budget raises taxes enough to be painful, then people will demand reductions in spending. That's the only way you're going to actually shrink the government.

Instead, people like you demand tax cuts first. Well, cutting taxes is easy; they've done it again and again in the past few decades. Cuttin

Oh wait, I forgot rule number whatever. "Whenever a rich and important company or person says they're for a tax that should cover them, SURPRISE it ends up covering everybody except them." (OOhh, I'll call it the Buffett Rule.)

Megacorps hiring legions of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists to limit/eliminate their tax liabilities. And politicians sucking up to the money bags whilst feigning outrage for the little guy. I'm shocked....just shocked, I say.

Google, Apple and Amazon are not doing anything wrong. They are in business to make money for their stockholders of which many I bet are UK citizens. In some jurisdictions they are legally REQUIRED to operate their enterprises to the best legal advantage of their stockholders.

Those UK citizens pay taxes on the dividends and capital gains they realize from owning stock in these companies. Not only that but these companies provide extremely useful services to UK citizens thereby enriching their lives.

Well, they're not doing anything illegal. And that's the crime, that the government can be bought (and cheaply). I can't speak in much detail for the UK, but in the US the Supreme Court has taken "money is speech" (true only in a limited way and in limited circumstances) to absurd extremes. The logical conclusion is that me handing a politician a briefcase stuffed with unmarked non-sequential $100 bills is protected free speech.

So it would seem that taxes, like laws, are for little people. Whereas writing the specs for the laws and the taxes, well that's for the corporations (which are people!) and for the special 1% big people. Well, no one said life was going to be fair, did they?:>)

Small firms have it so rough and they deserve our pity, even though they have lobbyist groups like Confederation of British Industry who will make sure that small firms don't have to make up for the loss in tax revenue.

Fuck the people who lose out on services and have to pay higher taxes to make up for the lack of revenue, though. Those people clearly don't deserve pity because they aren't a business or corporation. Only businesses deserve our pity.

I've been following this whole shitfest in the UK quite closely for the past few months, and one amusing thing has consistently struck me - the government are trying to be the goody-goody party in all of this, claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.

The government also has ruled out changing the tax law to prevent the current behaviours,because then they lose the trivially easy PR they get from "taking the companies to task" infront of Parliament and the media.

It's time to admit that the current tax law doesn't work once you are above PAYE (that's the government standard taxation for employees - normal people in the UK do not have to do any filings because it's all done by the HMRC for them and tax is taken out of their pay checks each month).

Setting up a company in the UK costs about $40. Doing annual returns for that company costs about $350. By working for that company for no wage, and taking out directors dividends, you save serious amounts of money through not having to pay income tax as the Corporate tax rates are significantly smaller than the income tax rates. This scheme is so heavily and widely used, even MPs in all parties got shamed earlier this year when they were named using it - but it's still completely legal.

No one should be expected to voluntarily pay more tax than they legally are required to, and no one should be shamed for not paying more tax than they are legally required to - if you want someone to pay more tax than they are legally required to, then legally require them to pay more tax! Don't beat around the bush, change the fucking law.

...claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.

Completely true and the government certainly shoulders some of the blame but they are also stuck in a very hard place. They could certainly change the tax law but the problem is how? They are up against multi-national corporations who will do anything they can to avoid paying tax and have armies of lawyers and a global reach to do just that. It is hard to see how any tax law can actually stop these companies and billionaires without being so strict, severe or complex that it will hurt smaller companies.

Nice example. The way you suggest to make the law "fair" is to make it enormously complicated (list every animal). There is a simple way, that really removes the loophole - "if an animal trainer's animal injures a viewer, the trainer must compensate the injured viewer < insert 3-10 classes of injury that every constitution has defined in other sections, and corresponding penalty.>"

Since you kind of assumed a circus scenario, I didn't cross the limits, but it is in general useless to make laws specifi

I've been following this whole shitfest in the UK quite closely for the past few months, and one amusing thing has consistently struck me - the government are trying to be the goody-goody party in all of this, claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.

This is just the government playing to the peanut gallery. If it was easy to change the law without breaching international treaties, pissing off lots of party donors and making the tax code even more labyrinthine than it already is (then watching ninja accountants find brand new loopholes and wheezes) then it would have been done years ago. So, they just wheel in a few high-profile household name firms, give them a public handbagging, maybe shame them into handing over a few bottle caps and bits of knotted

I guess you haven't been following it as closely as you think you have because Vince Cable's excuse was that Google is not doing anything illegal.

The simple fact is that the Tory party does not want to close these loopholes because many of their friends make use of them. They make some noise about it, go on Radio 4 and Newsnight and announce it in the Commons, but are careful not to really do anything.

The problem with only paying what the law requires is that these companies then arrange their corporate structure to avoid paying almost anything, against he spirit of the law. It then becomes a game of cat and mouse, except that parliament moves so slowly the mouse always finds a new hole to dive down as soon as there is talk of closing the old one off. You can't easily legislate to make them pay more tax, although it looks like the EU might have found a way to do it if every country acts simultaneously.

Maybe the last line of any tax law should be "no funny games".

Oh, and don't forget Google did actually lie. They said there were no sales done in the UK, yet most of their staff list sales as part of their duties on their CVs and in their job titles.

That's funny. Because many US companies move their intellectual property overseas to low tax regimes (like Ireland). And then they 'charge' their US divisions fees (deductible from US income) for the use of that IP.

How did they move billions of dollars of property out of US? If I try to haul more than $10,000 in cash (diamonds, securities, whatever) undeclared across the border, Customs will have my ass.

And if you think along those lines a little further, you'll see that you will never get a fair taxation system. What you can do is reduce the damage that the current system does by reducing its impact to the necessary minimum. If income, corporate, and capital gains taxes were all set at a flat 15% with no deductions, this would matter much less. Of course, government expenditures would have to be reduced and currently free services replaced with fee-for-service institutions.

Unfortunately neither do democracy and full-blown socialism, because the government owning all the means of production would give it limitless power. In the real world, the best we can do is a compromise. I do agree that these days it's clear which way the "compromise" is leaning.

the US Govt., effectively, owns at least the publicly traded means of production

That's completely backwards. It doesn't get "incestuous", rather the means of production (or the owners thereof) control the government.

Nothing close to free market capitalism, for sure.

No, it isn't. And while you didn't say otherwise, I'd like to say that capitalism doesn't require "free markets" (a term that's largely meaningless because it's so broad that people can "refine" the definition to be almost anything).

The article doesn't say, but it appears that when it says "tax" it is referring to *income* tax. For some reason, a lot of people forget that corporations, unlike people, pay income tax on NET rather than gross. In other words, the corporation pays all of its expenses, then pays income tax on what is left over. Those expenses include your salary, your benefits, new capital projects, and so on. Meanwhile, the real tax burden of the organization is much higher when you add in all the other taxes they are paying: sales tax, property tax, tariffs, and so on. The story that these corporations aren't paying very much in "taxes" is a gross distortion. They just aren't paying very much in income taxes, which is by design.

Despite moves by government to get Google, Amazon and Apple to admit they make sales in the UK and US [...]

The summary places the subject partly within the context of the recent sales tax debate in the US. The article doesn't talk about this, nor does it make any mention of grants and subsidies from the US. Even if it did, this would be missing the point. The taxes would not simply be "empty threats", whatever that means here. Even if the companies receive benefits from the government, they have cause to

Cost and expenses aren't equivalent. Expenses include expansion, new goods and services, research. All the things that create wealth. The idea of the different tax structure is to encourage that sort of investment.

The government's sole purpose of this action is to put into place more mechanisms to extract new taxes. The standard way all elected governments of the world get away with sticking it to the people with more unfair laws is to play the long game and start really small.

The gov knows that once the basic mechanism is in place, it is irreversible, consequently they initally make it sound harmless and agree to anything to get it in place (even initially giving up any benefit, such as that all the collected taxes

... eliminate all corporate taxes? Will that draw international corporations to come here. It probably would... until... they realize that we are taxing the people so hard that the cost of employing them here is too high. So they would just set up headquarters here, and hire the actual production people (workers) wherever they are the cheapest. So what do we gain? I say just drive them out.

It is easy to avoid income tax by using accounting tricks to shift profits around. It is far harder to avoid sales taxes, and even harder to avoid payroll taxes, property taxes, etc. Most corporations pay little income tax, but they still pay plenty of other taxes.

The summary makes the claim that only big companies avoid income tax, but at least in the US, that is false. Most small corporations in the US are S-Corps, which pay no income tax.

In the EU sales tax is applied in the source country. Companies like Amazon are often based in countries like Luxembourg because of low sales tax rates. The UK government gets no sales tax from Amazon sales (even though the goods are ordered from a co.uk website and shipped from UK warehouses).

In the EU sales tax is applied in the source country. Companies like Amazon are often based in countries like Luxembourg because of low sales tax rates. The UK government gets no sales tax from Amazon sales (even though the goods are ordered from a co.uk website and shipped from UK warehouses).

This makes no sense. In fact, it makes so little sense, that I don't believe it. I just did a Google search on European sales tax (VAT) policy, and several sites, including this one [retailresearch.org], contradict what you claim. If sales are below a threshold they are based on the shipping country, and if over the threshold they are based on the destination country. At no point are they based on where the company is incorporated, as you claimed.

Yep, one of the great things is that even though the US and Western Europe have decided they don't want you being productive in their country, there are still countries out there that are much more free.

It's easy to be "free" when the companies in question aren't actually IN your country. The government-provided services the freeloading companies depend on are paid for by the non-dodging taxpayers of the countries in which the business actually operate.

Because the Fed intentional manipulates the market to maintain unemployment? Because the working portion of a person's life is bookended by nonworking portions? Because we don't want to take the people who can't work out behind the barn and shoot them? Aside from those reasons, a lot of government spending, the majority of it, goes to people who are working. The government employs quite a few people, most of whose jobs we'd all agree need to be done.

The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers

Because while taxation may be tantamount to theft and it may be inherently evil and it may be desirable to minimise it as much as possible, we haven't yet found a more effective way to fund government services, and at least some of the services governments provide are valuable, including to those people at Apple and Google.

The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers

Because while taxation may be tantamount to theft and it may be inherently evil and it may be desirable to minimise it as much as possible, we haven't yet found a more effective way to fund government services...

Yes we have, long ago. We did it ourselves; often poorly or with spotty coverage, I agree, but certainly not at the price gov't charges for it. I'm not even speaking of the monetary price here either. Unfortunately, our parents and grandparents got lazy and drank the big gov't Koolaid, and we've been enslaved to it ever since, going in deeper with each succeeding generation.

If we're going to debate this, we need to be careful to distinguish between the scope of government and the efficiency of government.

Personally, I'd be the first to agree that many western governments have far too broad a scope today and the public sector has become unsustainably large. That's a real economic problem, and sooner or later someone's going to have to deal with it.

But on the efficiency question, the evidence is not nearly so clear. It's easy to find spectacular examples of government inefficien

Apple and Google enjoy the general public services just like the rest of us. This includes public roads, utilities, postal services. They exist and thrive in a society that is only possible through the strength of an organized nation-state such as the United States of America or Great Britain. This doesn't include any of the subsidies that I'm sure they manage to get or the fact that as a couple of the largest companies in existence, they have the ability to successfully lobby lawmakers.

While most could agree that tax revenue could probably be better spent these days, the fundamental concept of taxes is not stealing. Taxes are the price of civilization.

Apple and Google enjoy the general public services just like the rest of us. This includes public roads, utilities, postal services.

They pay for those directly through property taxes, and indirectly through payroll taxes, proportional to what they use. Corporate income tax is not used for any of that. And they mostly use private shipping companies for their products.

Taxes are the price of civilization

Just because some taxes are reasonable and necessary doesn't mean that any/all of them are.

This kind of thinking is precisely what is needed to solve these tax problems. Why does the government tax a percentage of profit? Instead, think of it as payments for a service. You have a factory full of computers? Well we the government are protecting that factory with our military, so you should pay a tax based on the value of that factory. You are hiring workers? Well we the government educated them at our schools, so you should pay a per worker tax. Utilizing our public road system means customers can

The money we give to large corporations though 'incentives', policies, military support, unneeded contracts and a host of other subsidies makes all of those 'welfare queens' that you're so worried about less important than a rounding error.

Good for Apple and Google. The government didn't earn the money they want to take. The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers?

For example, the government pays for police that will arrest people going to an Apple Store with guns and taking whatever they want.

In the US, Apple pays for police protection through their real estate taxes (and other local and state taxes), not corporate income tax. They also have their own private security. I suspect Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto would come out ahead even if they didn't get any direct revenue from Apple and Google.

In the UK, since money just disappears into a big bucket, it's of course much easier to play political bait-and-switch with taxes.

Does anyone who seriously uses the cliche that "taxes are theft" deserve to be treated as anything other than a troll? I'm all for open debate with anyone serious, including those who would all but abandon (in the US) the federal government. However, even anarchists may admit that some taxes are necessary. "Taxes are theft" is just a childish rant and should be treated as such.

Merger of government and corporate power. They are creating a tax that will hurt small and medium businesses, while their burden is cancelled out by grants and subsidies. This is a clear move to use the sword of government to cut down the competition. This is the DEFINITION of fascism.

Actually, according to dictionary.com, the definition of fascism [reference.com] is: "a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism."

The way it actually works is: You make money in France. You pay France 25% of your profits (I'm just pulling numbers out of my *ss. Bear with me.) But the US tax rate is 35%. You get a credit for that 25% paid but you still owe 10% to the US govt.

Why? The USA didn't have anything to do with your profits earned in France. So you move your corporation to a low tax jurisdiction. You pay France 25% of your French profits. You pay the USA 35% of your US profits (but only those earned in the USA). And all the lo